Effect of visual realism on cybersickness in virtual reality

Abstract

Virtual reality has been developing rapidly and gaining popularity in the past years as new devices and applications have been released. It is utilized in many fields like entertainment, health and science. Virtual reality is characterized by head-mounted devices that can immerse the user to the virtual environment, but it has been found out to cause an undesirable side-effect called cybersickness. Cybersickness has been studied vastly for many years and it has roots in simulators and motion sickness studies. Cybersickness has many symptoms including nausea, headache, eye stress and dizziness. There are many factors that can cause cybersickness, but the root cause is still unclear whether it is caused by a mismatch between visual and vestibular system or by instabilities in posture.

With modern devices and applications, visual realism has been developing far from the first wave of virtual reality in the 1990s, but there are not many studies that have been linking it to cybersickness. In this study, three graphical styles with different levels of graphical realism are compared to find out if high visual realism causes cybersickness. Cybersickness is measured with questionnaires that have become the standard in cybersickness studies. Results have been analyzed with quantitative methods.

Results of the study indicate higher visual realism causes more cybersickness than lower visual realism. Increased level of detail in high visual realism graphics causes more visual flow and stronger sensory mismatches that causes cybersickness. Reduced details also reduce depth cues in the graphics and does not cause as strong mismatches between visual and vestibular systems.